Who Chooses The Way We Adapt to Climate Change?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate policy. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the central focus of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a altered and growing unstable climate.
Environmental vs. Governmental Impacts
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.
From Technocratic Models
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about values and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Moving Past Apocalyptic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.
Developing Strategic Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.
